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Only in Madagascar

Pirates have left the island of Ste. Marie, but the spectacular beaches remain.Credit
Robin Hammond for The New York Times

IT was probably the weirdest sound I’d ever heard.

There we were, our first morning in Madagascar, breakfasting on the veranda of a jungle lodge near Andasibe-Mantadia National Park, munching on Paris-grade baguettes (Dr. Atkins beware: this country has excellent bread products), when all of a sudden a ghostly cry erupted from the thick green hills. It sounded a little like the mating call of a whale. Or someone pinching a balloon and slowly letting the air out. Or a squeaky metal wheel with no grease. I had never heard anything quite like it before: a long, haunting, melodic wail, carried through the trees.

The next thing I knew I was in the middle of a tropical rain forest dripping with vines and literally crawling with snakes, stumbling behind Monique, our indefatigable guide, in search of the animal responsible for the noise — the elusive Indri indri lemur.

Like so many other mammals, insects, trees, plants and reptiles (I’m talking fire-engine red tomato frogs and geckos shaped like leaves), the Indri indri is unique to Madagascar. This 1,000-mile-long petri dish of an island is a naturalist’s dreamland, and though its politics are a bit of a nightmare — there was a failed coup in November — the disruptions are rarely violent and it is generally safe to visit.

When you do, be prepared for some intensive wildlife bingo. As we approached a clearing, we ran into a group of American tourists on the prowl with their zoom lenses. One of them was grumbling about potential baby noises scaring off the animals. Meanwhile, Monique was loping through the forest whistling, hooting and making smooching sounds, constantly scanning the tops of the trees, trying to find lemurs.

“Look, look!” she suddenly said. Score. A whole family of Diademed sifakas (an endangered species of lemurs) was frolicking in the trees snacking on leaves with their little leathery, humanlike hands, seeming unfazed by the crush of tourists below, including the baby.

Cut off from the mainland 160 million years ago, Madagascar is host to some of the rarest and most unusual flora and fauna in the world. There are hissing cockroaches, giant jumping rats, pygmy chameleons, moths as big as dinner plates, along with various kinds of lemurs. You’ll see odd, wavy plants growing out of the desert that look as if they belong underwater. In fact, there is so much uncharted life here that scientists are constantly discovering more. Just this fall, a team of researchers announced that they had found a new species of carnivore lurking in one of Madagascar’s lakes.

And there are also beaches, really good ones. The last place we visited was the beguiling island of Ste. Marie, which features one postcard-perfect strip of sand after another. It also used to be a pirate hangout and still draws treasure seekers. We met some American divers who were convinced they were about to excavate Captain Kidd’s infamous pirate ship, the Adventure Galley, from the bottom of the Windex-blue seas.

But plan your trip carefully. Most of Madagascar’s goodies are sprinkled hundreds of miles apart. For example, the easiest place to see the dancing lemurs (technically known as Verreaux’s sifaka) is at the Berenty Private Reserve at the southern tip of the island; the capital, Antananarivo, is in the middle; the famous tree-lined Avenue de Baobab is in the west; the spectacular beaches in the north. The roads are rough and the internal airline hit-or-miss. Overall, it’s not the easiest place to get around, especially if your French is just comme ci, comme ça.

The whole experience, in fact, is a bit like that haunting lemur cry we heard our first morning, otherworldly and dislocating. I often found myself wondering, as we were driving around, looking out the windows: where the heck am I?

Part of this is because of its roots. Madagascar is part French, part African, part Indonesian. The island was unpopulated until 2,000 years ago, when anthropologists believe that some brave souls from Southeast Asia canoed or sailed thousands of miles across open ocean and settled here. You can see the Asian touches today: the rice paddies, the wide-brim hats, the steaming bowls of noodles for sale on the streets. The language’s closest living relative is found in Borneo.

Add to that an enduring French legacy (Madagascar was a French colony from 1896 to 1960), with delectable French patisseries, French-run boutique hotels and French spoken widely (very few people here speak English). But while the French may have left behind great cuisine, they did not prepare the country well for independence, leaving Madagascar distressingly poor and politically volatile. In 2009, there was a coup and some bloodshed and now a former disc jockey is in charge, backed by some generals. There was a half-hearted attempt at another coup in November, though it was swatted back quickly and without any bloodshed. One byproduct of all this is that in a country with enormous export potential — it is rich with sapphires, rubies, timber, oil and of course its signature product, vanilla — nearly everywhere we went we were accosted by packs of smoky-smelling street kids hustling vanilla beans in order to scrape together some change.

Another is the frustratingly lackadaisical treatment one can be subject to at Ivato International Airport in Antananarivo. Traveling with my wife and child, in addition to my wife’s parents, it took us a full hour to get through immigration, starting with a policewoman in high heels who demanded to know the ticket number of our flight home. Another officer checked each ticket; a third lazily thumbed through our passports; a fourth stamped them; a fifth scanned them. Seriously. I’ve been off the beaten track before (Djibouti, Burundi, Somaliland, Malawi, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea...), but never have I waited so long simply to get into a country. And this wasn’t a volume problem. There were maybe five other people in front of us.

My advice: get the visa ahead of time, even though Madagascar gives free tourist visas at the airport. We saw other tourists who had done this; they breezed right through.

Our 10-day holiday included two nature reserves and some beach time, with a few days in the capital in between. Our first stop: Andasibe-Mantadia National Park, one of Madagascar’s most popular, and only a three-hour drive from Antananarivo. Within two minutes of leaving the airport we were cruising by rice paddies, yet still in the midst of the city with delicate colonial-era buildings looming on the hilltops. It felt as though we were in Thailand. Or Bali. Workers in straw hats waded through the water as fluffy ducks paddled by. The weather was perfect, 75 degrees and sunny. We wound through small, curvy Candyland streets, past 40-year-old Citroën taxis with roll-back roofs, and by houses dipped in every color — purple, blue, maroon, orange, yellow, black. They like color here. After we left the city behind and the road eased into lush farmland, I even saw a pink tractor. Around dusk we pulled into the national park, which is home to several species of lemurs, including the Indri indri, whose name simply means “look up” or “look at that” in Malagasy. Apparently, the first European who saw a lemur was with a local guide who spotted one in a tree and said “Indri! Indri!”

Lemurs are adorable monkey-like animals that live only in Madagascar, with a few species on the nearby Comoros islands. They tend to dwell deep in the forest.

My favorite became the Indri indri, author of that distinctive, eerie song and resembling something that has been assembled from spare parts in the animal kingdom’s chop shop: raccoon snout; baboon legs; koala ears; a long tail like a fuzzy muffler; black and white fur like a skunk.

But I have to be honest. Lemur-watching, like bird-watching, takes a bit of concentration. For most people it’s probably not going to pack the same adrenaline punch as a typical African safari, infused with that exhilarating, almost spiritual sense of being out on the open veldt, with lions stalking their kill. Yet tracking lemurs offers something different, perhaps an even more intimate, delicate view of nature.

The fuzzy-headed animals are just a means to an end, an excuse and a pretext to tramp through a pristine rain forest where the air is cool, the sun warm and the rivers Evian-clear. Everything I experienced on those walks seemed so healthy and clean — the millions of leaves glossy with rain; the sharp, clear notes of the birds; even the rich, loamy smell of the dirt itself. Entering those forests and quietly padding through, I had the feeling I was stepping inside nature. It’s not clear how long this will last. Illegal logging companies have been exploiting the recent political turmoil and are eating up miles of Madagascar’s rain forests.

Our base during the first leg of our trip was the Vakona Forest Lodge, an eco-lodge with expansive grounds and delicious food. One night we dined on romazava, a Malagasy stew of chicken and ginger. The lodge also offers night hikes, which provide perhaps the only chance to see mouse lemurs. It promised to be an interesting evening when Dooli, our guide, appeared, reeking of what seemed to be Madagascar moonshine, and ushered us over to observe a few cobwebs under the eaves of the hotel. Then he marched us into the forest. It might seem absolutely insane — traipsing through a jungle at night with a guide who just stumbled out of happy hour. But that’s the thing about Madagascar. It’s ideal for trekking. The snakes aren’t poisonous and there are no big predators on the island.

The cities, too, feel safe, including Antananarivo, though there is some evidence that street crime is rising, possibly because out-of-work policeofficers or soldiers are using their guns to rob people. But you don’t see bars covering every single window or helmeted security guards swinging batons as you do in so many other big African cities.

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In many respects, it is an advantageous time to visit, with the tourism industry eager for post-coup business; even the best hotels tend to be available on very short notice.

Still, my mother-in-law wasn’t a big fan of the capital, which she described as “grubby.” She was right, in that Antananarivo is a teeming, polluted, unkempt city of two million people, spilled across several hills. But it does have some nice old palaces and bustling, never-ending street markets, too. Perched on top of one hill, with an expansive view of it all, was our hotel, La Varangue, which oozes character from the minute you step into the lobby and see the vats of homemade rum in all sorts of flavors like litchi, ginger and chocolate.

Antananarivo is known for its good restaurants, and according to the guidebooks we used for our trip (we found the Lonely Planet most helpful), La Varangue’s is top among them. The chef is Malagasy, though the dishes are modern French fusion, and we feasted on foie gras ravioli, zebu steaks in wine sauce (zebu is the local beef), ham, lamb and calamari. Then there was dessert. The waiter brought a perfectly round baseball-size orb of chocolate in a bowl. Picture the Death Star of chocolate. With a flourish and a naughty grin, he drenched the ball with even more chocolate — molten chocolate, which melted away some of the Death Star’s shell, exposing a scoop of ice cream, a candied peach and a layer of chocolate mousse. Madagascar may be known for its vanilla, but its chocolate is no joke.

Our next stop was the Berenty Private Reserve at Madagascar’s southern tip. The place is a bit strange in the sense that it’s a tourist trap but not really a resort — the bungalows are quite dull and a little shabby and the food so-so. It’s a royal pain to get to (about two hours by plane from the capital and then a spine-crunching, three-hour drive), but its access to lemurs — and especially the amusing dancing lemurs — is unrivaled. We woke up our first morning to the sight of dozens of lemurs playing right outside our bungalow, gobbling down green berries, springing through the trees, awkwardly sashaying along on their hind legs while waving their little stubby arms like the abominable snowman.

During breakfast we watched a group of eight sunning themselves by our table. At what seemed to be some hidden signal, they all sat up, and — en masse — made their advance. Then, before we could even flick on the camera, it was lemur madness. One jumped into my lap and snatched the hunk of baguette I was just about to butter. One of his comrades grabbed the breakfast cake. Another glanced right, glanced left, and then shot for the sugar bowl. I swear I caught a look of unbridled ecstasy on his furry little face as he dug his Lilliputian hands into the sugar and shoveled it into his mouth.

At this point, we were getting a little lemur-ed out, and eager for our final stop: the beaches of Ste. Marie. Infortunately, we lost a night because our flight was postponed, so our three nights were reduced to two; I really wish it had been a week. The island, about 40 miles long and 4 miles wide, is lush, tranquil, friendly and quite interesting. In the 1600s and 1700s, it was a notorious pirate den, perfectly located along trade routes from India to Europe. The French came here early, and Madagascar’s first church, built in 1837, still stands, its red bell tower rising out of the leafy forest.

There are empty, white-sand beaches everywhere, and in the morning, you can watch the pirogues slide by in the shallows. Little boys go door to door selling the catch. You can cover the whole island by bike — there’s a smooth paved road threading through the palms — and I borrowed a yellow cruiser from our hotel that the gods of the tropics had prankishly engineered so that if you went a hair faster than 10 miles per hour the chain would suddenly pop off.

The hotel we stayed at, the Princess Bora Lodge, had a beautiful pool and beach and comfy bungalows. On our last day, the hotel manager gave me a map of the island, marking the old church, the lighthouse and a pirate cemetery.

I set off, taking the turnoff from the main road and then walking past a deserted soccer field and a few ramshackle fishing huts before crossing a tiny bridge made from an iron beam that led to a narrow path. About 10 minutes later, it opened up into a palm grove, littered with very old-looking graves.

One was carved with a smiling skull and crossbones: Joseph Pierre Le Chartier; Died 1834. There were vines creeping across the blackened gravestones, slowly pulling them back to the jungle.

The American divers had warned me that the graves may not actually be those of pirates. But it didn’t really matter. It was like the miles and miles of Madagascar’s rain forest being the draw, not just the lemurs. The cemetery was profoundly soothing, positioned on a peninsula, the glassy bay spreading out on three sides, the sound of the tide nibbling at the shore, and a gentle breeze cutting through the trees.

I could see why the pirates, or whoever, had picked this place as an eternal resting spot. It made you never want to leave.

IF YOU GO

Many of the flights to Antananarivo Airport in Madagascar come out of Johannesburg or Nairobi. Peruse an Air Madagascar (airmadagascar.com) timetable before finalizing your itinerary, so you can connect between destinations without burning up unnecessary one-night layovers in the capital.

TOURS

We used a Madagascar-based tour operator, Boogie Pilgrim (261-20-22-530-70; boogiepilgrim-madagascar.com). They booked hotels, arranged for drivers to cart us around and handled all internal flights. Another guide option is a young independent operator, Manitra Andriamialisoa (261-32-472-4707; manitra.andriamialisoa@fulbrightmail.org), whom we met in the jungle in Andasibe. His English is impeccable and he runs small tours.

WHERE TO STAY

Our favorite hotel in Madagascar was the boutique La Varangue, in Antananarivo, the capital (261-20-22-273-97; www.tana-hotel.com). The chef is world-class, the rooms are quite comfy, and it is perched on a hilltop within walking distance of street markets and the main square. A room for one or two starts at 64 euros (or $84 at $1.31 to the euro).

Another good option in the capital is Hôtel Colbert, a full-service hotel with a spa (261-20-22-202-02; hotel-luxe-madagascar.com). Standard rooms start at 98 euros. This place has a patisserie that seems straight off the Champs-Élysées.

In Andasibe, we stayed at the Vakona Forest Lodge (261-20-22-624-80; hotelvakona.com), which has wonderful grounds to explore and a sense of tranquillity. Rooms start at 55 euros in January and February and at 65 euros the rest of the year.

The State Department suggests that travelers “should maintain security awareness at all times and should avoid political gatherings and street demonstrations.” It warns of crime, but adds that Madagascar is “by and large, safer than many other African countries and even certain U.S. cities.”